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Where like Arion on the dolphin's back I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves
Good morning, brain.
No, Viola did not gain the ability to change her sex at will when she was almost lost in the shipwreck off the coast of Illyria, because drowning is fucking the sea and all Poseidon's lovers are like that. I do not care that this argument was presented through lovely, classical, Greenaway-like cinematography, the sunlight playing harpsichord over a depth of pearl-green water and a very traditional Neptune among its motes: muscular, naked in pearl-strands and a billowing chlamys of kelp, his sea-streaming hair and beard as darkly glossed as wet mussel, trident in his left hand and conch in his right. Viola sinks in women's clothes into his arms, her face curved like a sleeper's into the hoplite-bronze ripples of her hair, then within its weed-drifts she twists and comes alive and the body revealed as stays, skirts, panels and ribbons fall away is a youth's, slender and hard-planed, as cleanly proportioned as a kouros, her skin as solid as stone in the undersea light. Their hair weaves together in the currents, their bodies dappling over one another like shoaling fish or seals; she wades out of the surf in the salt-heavy rags of her dress, her hair as tangled as rockweed, her girl's breasts bare until the sailors see her from their driftwood fires, running up the beach in sandy splashes at the dusk-margin of sea and land, relieved not to have to give up both twins for lost. And all the brothers too: and yet I know not. It is not textually supported and directors of Twelfth Night will look funny at you. Also there is no reason it should not have occurred with Sebastian, too, and that would be a very different story. (Though he was saved by human intervention, so perhaps that interfered. Seafaring Antonio is a loser in love, not successful at disguising. A skilled sea-captain—he has his god's favor, but not his graces.) No one I knew was playing any of the characters, not even actors from Prospero's Books (1991). They all had the right faces for the time, although it was not clear if that time was the seventeenth century, the sixteenth, or the fourth BCE.
Now if you could be this eloquent when you're awake, it would be useful. I am so very tired, and so tired of it.
No, Viola did not gain the ability to change her sex at will when she was almost lost in the shipwreck off the coast of Illyria, because drowning is fucking the sea and all Poseidon's lovers are like that. I do not care that this argument was presented through lovely, classical, Greenaway-like cinematography, the sunlight playing harpsichord over a depth of pearl-green water and a very traditional Neptune among its motes: muscular, naked in pearl-strands and a billowing chlamys of kelp, his sea-streaming hair and beard as darkly glossed as wet mussel, trident in his left hand and conch in his right. Viola sinks in women's clothes into his arms, her face curved like a sleeper's into the hoplite-bronze ripples of her hair, then within its weed-drifts she twists and comes alive and the body revealed as stays, skirts, panels and ribbons fall away is a youth's, slender and hard-planed, as cleanly proportioned as a kouros, her skin as solid as stone in the undersea light. Their hair weaves together in the currents, their bodies dappling over one another like shoaling fish or seals; she wades out of the surf in the salt-heavy rags of her dress, her hair as tangled as rockweed, her girl's breasts bare until the sailors see her from their driftwood fires, running up the beach in sandy splashes at the dusk-margin of sea and land, relieved not to have to give up both twins for lost. And all the brothers too: and yet I know not. It is not textually supported and directors of Twelfth Night will look funny at you. Also there is no reason it should not have occurred with Sebastian, too, and that would be a very different story. (Though he was saved by human intervention, so perhaps that interfered. Seafaring Antonio is a loser in love, not successful at disguising. A skilled sea-captain—he has his god's favor, but not his graces.) No one I knew was playing any of the characters, not even actors from Prospero's Books (1991). They all had the right faces for the time, although it was not clear if that time was the seventeenth century, the sixteenth, or the fourth BCE.
Now if you could be this eloquent when you're awake, it would be useful. I am so very tired, and so tired of it.
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Their hair weaves together in the currents, their bodies dappling over one another like shoaling fish or seals
--and I love that "genderfluid" is so thanks to (?) the fluidity of the sea.
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I can see it; I did. I just don't think I have the budget for filming Shakespeare in waking life that my brain has for presenting it in dreams.
I would love to see this performed by the stage company that did Tempest in Montreal at the end of 2004.
Was that the version that ended with Ariel stepping outside the theater, one moment waiting for the bus and the next gone?
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It was. I had gone to see a production of Twelfth Night (Theatre@First is doing one in September), but the experience was of watching a film, not a stage play, and then in the way of dreams it ceased to matter. I think it took some cues from the version I saw by the Actors' Shakespeare Project in 2011, which made so much of the sea throughout. I don't feel I have the intelligence to do anything with the images right now, but on the other hand this dream was finished as a novella in July, so I am reminding myself not to despair.
--and I love that "genderfluid" is so thanks to (?) the fluidity of the sea.
All Poseidon's lovers are like that; it's an old connection. The sea is a shape-changer.
I think there is a lot of sea-longing in this dream.
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They all had the right faces for the time, although it was not clear if that time was the seventeenth century, the sixteenth, or the fourth BCE.
For some reason I especially like this.
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I have to say that I would love that job.
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But she could have.
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It is true that I'm now wondering if it would make any difference at all to the story . . .
(I like that icon.)
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Thank you. My dreams are even better at timeslip than I am.
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...oh.
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I love that.
I love the whole idea. I probably will never encounter Twelfth Night again in any of its mutating forms without thinking back on this journal entry.
In this way, you have also just wrought a sea change. Who are you, Neptune's daughter?
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Nine
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I can't take credit for the dream except in the unconscious way, but I wanted to get it down.
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Thank you. I hope to do something with it someday.
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If I ever figure out how to make it happen outside my brain, I'll let people know!
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Madd Harald is the director in question. I was fortunate enough to see several of his plays.
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Thank you. I never feel that I can take full credit for things in dreams, but I wanted not to lose this one.
Who are you, Neptune's daughter?
It would be an honor.
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I'd love any of those things. (The story I would have to write myself. See reply to
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Thank you. Please feel free to continue to do so! I say hello to the sea, wherever you find it.
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Thank you. I don't know what I can make out of the images or when, but it's sticking with me.